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A FOREIGNER, noting
the enthusiasm with which Englishmen visit their old Cathedrals and Abbeys,
might imagine a profitable reconstruction of English history from a series of
pilgrimages to its mediæval military remains. Certainly there are prehistoric
and British earthworks, especially in the English hill-country; there are the
Roman forts — the first border-holds of England — dotted along the wall of
Hadrian and the Saxon shore; at their highest navigable points many English
rivers flow past Danish camps. Castle Hill, at Thetford, may be put down as
Anglo-Saxon, while, as the Bayeux Tapestry proves beyond a doubt, Hastings is
contemporary in time and identical in situation with the Norman invasion. Why
not then see the whole pageant of history in these Norman fortresses, in the
adulterine castles raised under Stephen, in the works of that great builder
Henry III, and of his son Edward I, Conqueror of Wales? And why not in the
Cinque Ports; in Bodiam, a manor house fortified under Richard II for the
protection of Hythe in case of a French landing; and in deserted Amberley,
raised by the Bishops of Chichester? The chain extends link by link through the
Wars of the Roses to the sea-coast forts fostered by Henry VIII and Elizabeth;
it includes Peveril, in the Peak district, around which Scott wove his romance
of the Stuarts, and Oxford, defended by Prince Rupert; and even — a weak link
indeed — the Strawberry Hill Gothic mansions, so typical of the eighteenth
century; a chain which did not end with the Martello towers of the Napoleonic
wars, for are not English cliffs to-day still crowned by trenches and barbed
wire? With these earthworks English warfare returned to its earliest
beginnings. A foreigner with a
keen eye to distinguish between true and false would, indeed, derive profit
from such a pilgrimage. But he would have to realize that few English castles
are faithful witnesses to the past. Of the adulterine castles characteristic of
the anarchy of Stephen’s reign, hardly one can be identified with certainty
to-day — it may be, indeed, that earthworks commonly thought to be British are
relics of these very castles. Pontefract, which once was called the Troy of
England, is now a heap of rubble in a garden; Colchester, built by the
Conqueror against the Danes, has become the shelter for a museum; York and
Lincoln are now used as prisons, which, as one writer on the subject naïvely
remarks, “naturally bars access to the public”; Peveril has gained a mistaken
fame amongst tourists, for Haddon Hall appears to have been the real scene of
Scott’s novel. Such a man would be wise to concentrate on those castles which
preserve or reconstruct their original strength of outline, which indicate
their former purpose and importance. And of these castles Alnwick is one. Although the castle
of Alnwick has been rebuilt, it still boasts of the name of Percy, a family as
famous in Border literature as the strongholds they maintained; it still stands
prepared for a siege as it did in the time of Harry Hotspur, allowing for the
improbable event of an army approaching with trebuchets and mangonels; with
antiquarian pride the Dukes of Northumberland have restored to it much of the
apparatus of defence; while the stone “defenders” — figures of bowmen on the
battlements meant to frighten the enemy — still mount guard over the gate
house. It is, in fact, an excellent example of the creation of a modern country
house without prejudice to the form of a mediæval castle. Lying on a slight
slope from the south bank of the river Aln, the castle was strategically
important in its command of the road between Berwick and Newcastle, which made
it inevitably a focus of Border warfare. Its known history began soon after the
Conquest, with the knowledge that the family of De Vesci was in possession of
the site in the reign of Henry I. Eustace FitzJohn, who married into the De
Vesci family, is commonly believed to have built the castle. The whole
formation of the building points to the date at which he held the barony, with
which the innermost gateway and the lower part of the outer curtain wall bear
evident traces of identification. So the period of the castle’s building may be
placed in the first half of the twelfth century. Throughout its
reconstructions — in the fourteenth century, in 1760, and again in 1854 — the
plan of the castle has not been altered to any great extent. The mound is
covered with domestic buildings, and the whole surrounded by a curtain wall
making an enclosure which is divided into two wards. FitzJohn probably built
the curtain walls, levelled the mound to its present height, and replaced by
his shell keep in stone the wooden donjon and palisade, which, together with
the domestic buildings within the palisade, formed the earliest castle on this
spot. The pure form of a shell keep has been obscured, however, by the present
cluster of towers and connecting buildings which evolved as military needs
became less pressing than the desire for comfort and splendour. Still it never lost
the character of a shell keep, for, if its possible use as an ultimate refuge
had ceased altogether to have weight with the Percys, they would have copied
the style of Windsor by building their palace in one of the two wards. Of the castle’s many
interesting features one is struck at once by the outer and inner gatehouses.
The outer gatehouse, fronted by the barbican, projects altogether nearly a
hundred feet outside the west curtain. Originally the castle ditch, which
passed between barbican and gatehouse, had a loop passing in front of the
barbican, so that the gatehouse was protected by two drawbridges and a
portcullis, in addition to its flanking rectangular buttresses corbelled out
above into oblong turrets containing shelters. An enemy force might well
hesitate before attempting to enter here, as the long, narrow passage of the
barbican would shepherd an attacking party together like sheep in a pen. The
danger of an attempt to turn the flank of the gatehouse by a breach in the
curtain wall was met by a series of flanking towers, from which an enemy who
did succeed in forcing an entrance to one of the two wards would be assailed in
the rear as well as from the towers of the keep. On the north, towards the
river, the keep was formerly unprotected by the curtain wall, as though
inviting an attack from a quarter more easily defended by the broad ditch and
by the natural slope of the river bank, which was artificially scarped. Communications
between the outer and inner wards were safeguarded by the middle gate, and the
entrance to the keep in the inner ward by a gatehouse, evidently built in the
fourteenth century around the gateway which protected the citadel of Eustace
FitzJohn. Of this a fine Norman arch remains. No doubt a lover of
romance whose imagination is most easily stirred by the obvious would linger
long over the prison chambers in the arches of the gates, complete with
underground oubliettes for refractory prisoners, but these were probably used
more often as a repository of herrings and salt meat than for despairing
captives. More interesting, however — especially to an artist — is the
picturesque well within the courtyard of the keep. The hood of the well has the
form of three niches within a containing arch. The well shaft rises through the
central niche, and in the other two are wooden wheels set round with pegs for
the hoisting of buckets. Above is a statue of a monk blessing the source,
probably an eighteenth-century embellishment. The mediæval architect lavished
his ornamentation upon the most necessary features of his building, thereby
differing from his modern successor, to whom ornament often appears a means of
filling up blank spaces; and this well is a reminder that a siege was not a
highly adventurous series of sorties, or of hand-to-hand fighting along the
walls, but a test of passive endurance, until either the supplies of food and
drink failed the besieged, or the army of the besieger melted away to their
fields and flocks. In all Border
warfare Alnwick was one of the strongest fortresses on the English side. In its
earliest days, when it could have been little more than a palisaded mound,
Malcolm III of Scotland was killed there by an English knight of Robert de
Mowbray’s levy raised on behalf of William Rufus. Near the Ravine tower in the
north-east curtain wall, variations in the masonry mark what is known as the
“Bloody Gap,” said traditionally to be the position of a breach made by the
Scots; but a modern historian, more restrained than the legendmonger, declares
that it more probably marks the site of a fallen curtain tower, and as Eustace
FitzJohn built the Norman castle some time after the date of this affray, the
truth is, unfortunately, on the side of the historian. Another Scottish
monarch met a less dignified fate outside the walls of the castle of FitzJohn.
William the Lion had invaded England on behalf of Henry II’s rebel sons. He was
besieging Alnwick with a small force of 500 knights, while, unknown to him,
Odonel de Umfraville, Bernard de Balliol, and other northern barons were
advancing to its relief throughout the night, by forced march and in fog. Andrew Lang well
describes the scene in his history of Scotland:— “So thick was the
air that some were for returning. Balliol, however, insisted on an advance. They
passed unseen by Warkworth, then beleaguered by the Scots, and when the cloud
lifted found themselves near Alnwick Castle, which was in friendly hands.
Thither they rode, when they beheld a party of knights tilting in a meadow. It
was like a scene in the ‘Morte d’Arthur’: the blind advance in an unknown
enchanted land, the apparition of the castle above the breaking cloud, the sun
shining on the armour of the strange tilting knights. To them the Yorkshire
horsemen seemed part of one of their own scattered companies; but when William
marked the English cognizances, he, for he was one of the Scottish tilters,
rode straight at the ranks of England. His horse was pierced by a spear, and
the greatest prize of feudal warfare, a hostile King, with his lords of Norman
names, was taken.” William the Lion
was ignominiously led away to Newcastle with his legs tied beneath his horse’s
belly; and the park of Alnwick to-day glories in two monuments marking the
downfall of Scottish kings. The line of de
Vesci continued until the end of the thirteenth century, when the castle came
into the hands of the Percys, with whose name it is inseparably connected. The
history of that family was for centuries the history of England, of Scotland,
and, in fact, of France as well, so that in the restorations of the fourteenth
century was combined the experience of those who appreciated the necessities of
Border warfare with the military knowledge learnt under the Black Prince in
France. In the rebellion of the Percys against Henry IV, then, the capture of
Alnwick must have been one of the most serious problems which the King was
called upon to face. A memory of Harry Hotspur lingers in a rectangular
projection of the north-east curtain, which is traditionally called Hotspur’s
Chair; and it may have been one of the hero’s favourite posts of observation.
But Henry IV was strong enough to take Alnwick in 1405. Hotspur had already
fallen at Shrewsbury in 1403, and the Earl of Northumberland shared the violent
fate that overtook so many of his family at Bramham Moor in 1408. The interest of
Alnwick lies as much in its past history as in its present state. It began as
one of the first outposts set up by the victorious Norman barons against the
Scots. It became the possession of a family proud of a name that went back to
the early days of the Northmen, a name which was to become an integral part of
English literature and history. Alnwick maintains in our day an importance
appropriate to its position in the Middle Ages. The struggle for power between
the baronage and the monarchy is forgotten, and the castle of the Percys has
become their palace.  ALNWICK CASTLE. |
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